


but it was more so an idea

by koedeza



Series: on a long enough timeline the survival rate for everyone drops to zero [2]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Dean growing up, Gen, Sam growing up, This kinda sucks, Wee!chesters, but its so FUN TO WRITE, john decaying kinda
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-09
Updated: 2019-06-09
Packaged: 2020-04-23 16:36:59
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,667
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19154887
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/koedeza/pseuds/koedeza
Summary: Sam is nine.It’s been a year of beasts and broken bones, and Sam thinks he finally understands.What he knows for sure is that John hunts monsters, has been roping Dean into doing it since his brother was seven. What Sam has to come to understand is that hunting isn’t what John does for a living, not exactly.





	but it was more so an idea

**Author's Note:**

> two fics in two days? unheard of.

Sam is nine.

It’s been a year of beasts and broken bones, and Sam thinks he finally understands.

What he knows for sure is that John hunts monsters, has been roping Dean into doing it since his brother was seven. What Sam has to come to understand is that hunting isn’t what John does for a living, not exactly.

**-x-**

Sam is loading and unloading a gun, his hands moving deftly in the dark. Dean turns on the floor next to him, sleeping bag rustling loudly.

“Sam, go to sleep.”

“No.”

“Stop playing with the gun.”

“It’s too hot, I can’t sleep,” Sam lies, hands moving faster and faster.

“You’re going to shoot off that Glock and kill someone Sam, stop, I mean it.” Dean hisses.

Sam does. “Fine, but you have to answer my question.” He rolls to face Dean, clicks the safety on and sets the gun on the ground.

“What do you want to know?” Dean sighs, rolling up to stare at the ceiling. His green eyes look milky in the shard of moonlight that comes in through the window.

“Why does dad hunt- No, wait.” He corrects himself. “What is he hunting?”

“What do you mean what is he hunting?” Dean says incredulously. “Monsters, you idiot.”

Sam isn’t being insufferable, he’s being assertive, and he thinks that’s why Dean’s annoyed. “If he were hunting something, he would have found it by now. Dad’s not bad at what he does, I can tell. So what is he hunting?”

“Go to sleep, Sam.”

Because of this, Sam decides being insufferable is the best way to go, so he picks the gun back up and starts taking it apart.

“Jesus Christ, I hate you sometimes,” Dean mutters angrily.

Sam silently agrees but stops toying with the Glock, because now that he thinks about it he knows why his dad hunts. It doesn’t make John any money, and there’s no reward in taking down a wendigo or a black dog, but it keeps John alive.

Sam just wishes it could keep him alive too.

**-x-**

Oregon is decidedly the worst state that they’ve ever stayed in, but Sam blames it all on the run-down house they’re living in.

It’s a tiny bungalow with shit lighting and a hornet’s nest on the porch. The neighbors are loud and drink all day, the little kids across the street cry because they’re hungry, and all the things Sam wants to do he can’t.

It’s a muggy April day when John’s standing outside by the Impala, teaching Dean how to fix some broken part of her, and Sam’s tugging at John’s coat sleeve.

“I wanna practice shooting.” He says quietly.

John’s face goes from surprise to suspicion back to surprise. “We got a backyard, shoot there. Dean can help you set up some cans.”

Dean sticks his head out from under the car and scowls.

“Yeah, but I’m a nine-year-old with a gun. That’s weird, even in some dead-end Oregon neighborhood.” Sam deadpans.

John rubs at his stubble then looks down at his son. “Ok. I’ll finish up with Dean, then I’ll take you out.”

This is one of those moments Sam will never forget.

**-x-**

Dean heads off with some friends, supposedly to do homework, but everyone in the family knows that that isn’t what he’s really doing.

Sam doesn’t care though, because he’s sitting next to his dad in the front seat of the Impala and he has the Glock in the front compartment of the ‘Pala and he feels secure. They drive out of the rougher part of the neighborhood and stop at a Dairy Queen drive-thru where Sam orders a sundae and his dad gets a vanilla cone. They sit in the car and eat and it’s hard to resist the smile that Sam feels creeping up on his face.

**-x-**

They’re in the woods and Sam’s squeezing off rounds, eyes squinted at the cans set up in front of him.

“Sam move your feet a little, spread them out- Yeah, like that.”

Every once in a while John will offer helpful comments or point out a flaw in Sam’s technique while he shoots.

“Sam?”

“Yeah, dad?”

“I don’t want you growing too attached to that gun, you hear?”

Sam falters, grip tightening around the warm metal. He’d never thought of his willingness to learn as something his dad would be concerned about, but he nods and says yessir like he’s been taught.

What he really wants to say is that he doesn’t like to shoot, isn’t particularly fond of his newfound ability to kill things, but he just likes the sense of control that he has in knowing how. There are dangerous things in the woods, and Sam doesn’t intend to die when he had the chance to learn.

“You used to read a lot. What happened to that?” John asks, and Sam stops for a second but then plays it off by moving his feet on the ground. He’s surprised John knows about how much he read before, how he liked to take in words and phrases and pages and swallow them whole. His dad sounds young like he’s just now getting to know his kid for the first time, and with it comes an air of disappointment for both of them.

Sam wants to say I’m sorry, but he doesn’t know what he’d be apologizing for.

“I guess I started learning about what really matters.” Sam squeezes off another round and finally hits the can off the fence.

**-x-**

At school, Sam draws banshees and borderwalkers and obake and sirens and griffins and thinks about a friend of his who used to draw. In this elementary school, there’s a group of boys who play soccer during recess and he joins them, high-fiving when a goal is scored, screaming when he’s open on the field. 

He doesn’t think he’s ever had a full conversation with any of them.

**-x-**

Dean is showing Sam how to hold someone in a headlock when he says, “You need to catch up on your fighting little brother,”

Sam elbows Dean in the face, claims it was on accident, and scrambles to his feet. “That’s completely unfair.” is all he says before he leaves Dean alone, holding a hand to his eye.

**-x-**

He comes back with an ice pack, hands it over.

“You’re mad,” Dean says, pressing the pack up to his eye.

“I’m not mad.”

“Yes you are, and you shouldn’t be. God Sam, be happy dad didn’t force this on you like he did on me.”

Sam wants to yell that yes, that’s exactly why he’s mad, but then he’d just be disproving his point, and that’s something only children do.

He’s a child. He knows he’s a child.

Sam feels nothing like a child, but he still sits next to Dean with his chin in his hands.

**-x-**

One day, Sam gets called in after class by Mr. Whatever-His-Name-Is to talk. Sam is taken aback because the school district he’s in is terrible, and most of the teachers are terrible, but this one has called him in to talk. It’s weird in itself.

“Sam, you were doing excellent when you arrived and I’ve seen your past grades. What’s going on buddy? Is something wrong at home?” The teacher shuffles papers on his desk and stares at Sam with watery blue eyes the size of saucers.

“I’m in the 4th grade. Grades don’t matter.” Sam says.

“Sam, that’s not true. Your development as a learner matters.”

“I don’t have time for things like multiplication tables, Mr.-” Sam sees the frilly name card on the desk. “-Mr. Andrews.”

Something in the watery blue eyes clicks and suddenly the man in front of him goes from soft and doe-eyed to calculating. Sam knows the exact direction this is going in and he can already see his family’s one fear being manifested, sees it like smoke clouding his vision.

“I read.” He blurts.

He shoots.

“I read a lot, and I read advanced books and I know how to do everything we learn already-”

My brother teaches me to fight in the afternoons and every weekend my dad shows me a new kind of firearm.

“I don’t have time for school work, because I’m always too busy reading.”

I don’t have time for school work, because I do not want to die.

It distracts Mr. Andrews enough, and despite Sam’s reluctance, they talk about books for so long that by the time they’re done Sam has missed the daily recess soccer game.

**-x-**

There’s a worn copy of To Kill a Mockingbird stuck under the seats of the Impala, but Sam doesn’t bother retrieving it.

**-x-**

Sam forgets he turns ten because on May 2nd, at one in the morning, Dean comes home drunk.

Sam hears his dad turning on porch lights, sees Dean stumble up the steps and vomit onto the linoleum kitchen floor. He sees something akin to empathy in John’s eyes as he takes Dean to the couch and helps him lie down, gives him a glass of water. He stands in the threshold of his room the whole time and only when he catches John’s pale eyes that he decides to step forward. He sits next to Dean’s feet and puts something on the TV as his brother cries, quiet sloppy tears.

In the evening, while Dean takes a shower, Sam does the laundry, still feeling a little numb from his brother’s arrival.

“Sam I’m sorry.”

He jumps and turns around, John standing in the back door of the kitchen.

“I forgot it was your birthday.” John says. There’s a brown bag in his hands, sorrow in his eyes as he hands it over.

Sam steps up and takes it, uttering a thank you and carefully opening it, careful not to rip at the thin paper.

It’s a gun, shiny metal glinting under the fluorescent kitchen light.

Sam doesn’t know why he was expecting a book.


End file.
